A media program genome includes words or phrases that reflect salient characteristics of a media program, such as a television show or movie. The genome may not be just a tag or a keyword because the genome is well-defined and also synonyms have been removed.
The genome can reflect different aspects of characteristics. For example, the aspects may be divided into factual aspects and semantic aspects. Factual aspects may not be very relevant to the storyline of the media program, but rather present factual information related to the media program, such as the actor, director, studio, language, awards, production country, release year, source, and so on. The semantic aspects may be more relevant to the storyline, such as comments, genre, mood, story time period, location, plot, property, score, and so on.
For each aspect, a company may define some words or phrases as the genome. For example, for the genre aspect, the words or phrases of Action, Animation, Drama, Comedy, Western, and Documentary are assigned to the genre aspect. Each word may be a genome and within each genome, terms may be assigned for the genome, such as Action is associated with the terms “action” and “feats”. The process of assigning words for the genome may be a manual process and subject to subjective views of the assigner.